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Forty Years Later, a Photographer Finally Gets His Show

By Stacey Baker May 11, 2012 2:19 pmMay 11, 2012 2:19 pm

Slide Show

Recently a photographer friend on Facebook introduced me to the remarkable work of John Myers, who had his first solo exhibition earlier this year at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England. What made this feel like such a discovery is not only quality of the pictures themselves but also the fact that Myers stopped taking photographs altogether in 1988.

I called him a couple of weeks ago to find out what his story was. Myers, who is 67 and a retired fine arts professor, started taking pictures in 1972, when his appointment to a full-time teaching position at the Stourbridge College of Art didn’t leave him with enough time to spend whole days painting, something he had enjoyed doing as a student. “It suited the business where you could go out and take photographs and then at a later time” process and print them, he told me.

He was influenced by the photography he found in books at the local library — John Szarkowski’s “Photographer’s Eye,” for example — and the work of photographers like August Sander and Diane Arbus. “I really did object to the world of, particularly, Ansel Adams and that kind of American photography, which is highly technical — it’s almost like creation in the darkroom.” A 1972 retrospective of Arbus’s work had a particularly strong impact. “She talked about technique and she used the phrase ‘my technique is adequate,’” he said. “All of that kind of magic and darkroom messing around just kind of disappears, and you’re actually left with the real world.”

For Myers, the real world was Stourbridge, the “normal small English town” that has been his home for nearly 40 years, and where most of his pictures were taken. His subjects, shot using a 4X5 Gandolfi camera, were people he knew and their children, as well as the houses and roads around town. “There’s nothing particularly remarkable about where I actually ended up working and living and eventually marrying and settling down,” he said. “This is the world that the great majority of people live in.”

Myers stopped photographing in 1988 when the Stourbridge College of Art faced closure, and a lot of his time was spent “trying to save my job.” Stourbridge survived by merging with the University of Wolverhampton, but Myers never returned to photography. He says he doesn’t miss it. “I don’t believe in going back,” he said. “For me, the stuff in the mid-’70s, if it has got any kind of quality, it’s the excitement of discovery. It’s the excitement of coming across influences. I don’t think you can go back.”

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…